The numbering may suggest otherwise but Op 18 No 3 was the first string quartet Beethoven composed. One theory for the change of order is that this D major work was too strange, too full of struggles with a medium the composer was only beginning to master. Not that it sounds like that to our ears, especially in the agile, fluent hands of the Hagen Quartet. Op 18 No 5 has a deceptively airy wit, pulled ineluctably towards the weighty Andante cantabile. Nearly 30 years later came the last quartet, Op 135. If your appetite has been whetted by seeing A Late Quartet, featuring Op 131, this is for you. The playing is insightful, probing, masterly. Any resemblance between the Hagen – founded in 1981, with a female viola player and certain inter-quartet family connections – and the quartet in the film is purely coincidental.